GoKawiilToday, we're testing the impact of using a dedicated secondary RTX 5060 GPU to boost the performance of an RTX 5090 in a few classic Batman Arkham titles that support 32-bit PhysX, and with impressive results. Sure, these results aren't going to be broadly applicable to all titles and configurations, or even entirely practical, but we're doing this for science, and we generated some interesting benchmarks to chew over.
Back in 2001, Swiss company NovodeX AG developed a physics simulation engine called NovodeX. Just 3 years later, NovodeX AG was acquired by Ageia, a fabless semiconductor company, which began development on hardware-accelerated physics technology. Ageia called this technology PhysX.
PhysX is a multi-threaded real-time physics engine SDK that supports numerous physics effects and runs on CUDA-enabled graphics cards. Games like the Batman Arkham series, Mafia II, Mirror’s Edge, Metro 2033, Metro: Last Light, and numerous others utilize PhysX effects for more realistic physics and greater immersion.
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Ageia designed accelerator cards called Physics Processing Units (PPUs) aimed at aiding the CPU in physics calculations in games using the PhysX API. Nvidia acquired Ageia in 2008, after which point the company discontinued standalone PPUs and added hardware acceleration for PhysX to its own GPUs.
Why is the GPU Better Suited for PhysX?
Computing large amounts of simultaneous mathematical and logical calculations needed for physics in games is a difficult task, especially for the CPUs from 2005 to 2015, when PhysX integration was at its peak. Graphics cards with thousands of parallel cores are much better suited to perform these simultaneous calculations than CPUs. On systems that do not support hardware acceleration for PhysX effects, performance takes a massive hit as the CPU is used as a fallback.
Physics effects can run efficiently on modern CPUs, but the PhysX implementation in these games was specifically optimized for GPUs, so even modern processors struggle with PhysX effects.
And that's not the end of the performance challenges for PhysX-enabled games. When GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards launched in early 2025, support for 32-bit CUDA was deprecated, which meant that users with these GPUs would experience lackluster performance when enabling PhysX in 32-bit games that support it, as hardware acceleration was no longer an option. However, in December of 2025, support for 32-bit PhysX was added for the RTX 50-series in select games with a driver update.
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